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Difference between revisions of "Trouble Exporting To Excel"
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Whether it's a true, known exploit or just a theory is known only to Microsoft. | Whether it's a true, known exploit or just a theory is known only to Microsoft. | ||
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| + | This explanation might make more clear the reason one of the workarounds works. A user with sufficient permissions can Unblock a file that the operating system thinks is suspicious. In this case, Windows (the operating system) thinks it's suspicious that a file with extension .xls doesn't contain Excel data. The user (with Administrator permissions) can right-click, go to the Properties dialog, and Unblock the file. Then it will open per usual. | ||
Revision as of 11:53, 8 August 2016
Having Trouble Exporting to Excel?
Executive Summary
Some users are finding themselves unable to export pages to Excel in TrackAbout the way they used to.
Downloaded Excel files are not opening properly, or appear blank when they are opened.
Why is this happening?
Microsoft releases Windows Updates on the second Tuesday of every month (a.k.a. Patch Tuesday). In the July 12, 2016 bundle, Microsoft included an update named KB3115262.
This Microsoft update broke a common feature of Excel that allowed Excel to open HTML files containing table data downloaded from web sites. This has caused Export to Excel functionality to break in TrackAbout, as well as countless other web sites.
If this hasn't happened to you yet, it's possible your IT department has not yet deployed the July Microsoft patches to your computer.
This is not browser-specific. It doesn't matter whether you use Internet Explorer vs. Chrome vs. Firefox. Things broke because Microsoft changed how Excel works, not how browsers work.
This is not a result of TrackAbout's recent UI Facelift. We actually wish it was, because we could fix it quickly.
Does Microsoft Know What They've Done?
They are aware. We're following this Microsoft TechNet post where people are complaining to Microsoft.
It appears Microsoft has broken a great many web sites, including Salesforce and their own Microsoft Dynamics CRM product with this change.
We Are Working on a Fix
We have engineers working right now to change the way users download data from the site. It should be a permanent fix, if we can get it working. But it won't be available for a month or two at best.
What Are The Workarounds in the Mean Time?
The easiest workaround is to stop using Export to Excel for now, and instead manually copy/paste the table data from the page you want into Excel. If you highlight and select just a table in a web page and Ctrl-C copy, you can then Ctrl-V paste the table directly into Excel.
There are a great many workarounds suggested in the Microsoft TechNet post. The best option for your company should be discussed with your IT staff.
It's difficult for us to recommend the best workaround from those possible because every company has different security policy. The easiest fix is to uninstall KB3115262. However, since this is a "recommended" security update, it's not really our place to tell you to do that.
Other fixes require a user to have Administrator privileges on his or her machine, which no regular user should have.
I'm still reading. Why did this really happen?
You like the technical stuff? Ok, strap in.
A very common method of implementing "Export to Excel" in a web site is to scrape the contents from an HTML table and send it back to the browser, changing the HTTP response headers on the way.
The specific HTTP headers would look something like:
content-disposition: attachment; filename=MyExportedData.xls content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel
What the server is actually sending down is plain HTML. But the server is telling the browser that the file is really an Excel file, so the browser will save it as an .xls file.
The file gets downloaded to the local computer and placed on the hard drive. The user can also choose to Open the file immediately.
Excel used to not care that an .xls file actually contained HTML and was not, technically, an Excel file. Excel would happily import the HTML data.
Microsoft changed this behavior because they now believe that opening HTML in Excel poses some kind of security risk. That's their reason for blocking it.
Whether it's a true, known exploit or just a theory is known only to Microsoft.
This explanation might make more clear the reason one of the workarounds works. A user with sufficient permissions can Unblock a file that the operating system thinks is suspicious. In this case, Windows (the operating system) thinks it's suspicious that a file with extension .xls doesn't contain Excel data. The user (with Administrator permissions) can right-click, go to the Properties dialog, and Unblock the file. Then it will open per usual.